A Night At The Bones Museum

This week, our favorite crime-solving, sparks-flying duo have to contend with a murder involving a museum artifact. But things could be worse. At least Ben Stiller isn’t around.

When a guard at an electrical plant discovers a body hanging against an electrified fence, he freaks out and the Jeffersonian team is called in. But Brennan quickly determines that the body isn’t a murder victim…or at least a murder victim of this century. The body is completely decomposed yet looks surprisingly preserved. It’s a mummy!

The catch is that the 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy has an arterial spray of fresh blood on it. So someone was killed while the mummy stood nearby. Brennan obviously doesn’t think the mummy somehow supernaturally killed someone, and I agree with her. The only other explanation then is that someone killed someone else over something involving the mummy and that person’s blood soaked said mummy. Brennan tells the team that they have to identify the mummy so that they can get an idea of who would kill for it.

Compounding the investigation is that the mummy’s torso has recently been torn open. Was there something stored inside the mummy worth killing for? This discovery is made by intern-of-the-week Daisy, Sweets’ obnoxiously perky girlfriend. If you’ll recall, Brennan laid the smack down on her last season for being well…obnoxious. But Sweets begs her to give her another chance so Brennan agrees to give her a 24-hour probationary period. Man do I wish she had not made that decision. Once again, I still don’t understand why the writers insist on revolving the interns every week. Why can’t they just pick one, preferably Wendell, and make him permanent, so they can start building a character? Ugh.

Regardless, obnoxious Daisy actually does some solid work. She notices “malformations of the skeleton and skull,” which, coupled with the fact that the male mummy was decapitated causes Bones to display a rare instance of jubilance in the workplace. She’s practically giddy as a schoolgirl, excitedly waxing about how important a discovery this could be and how she could be on the cover of some anthropology magazine (that no one probably reads but let the poor woman have her moment). It’s really fun to see her excited like this, to show that she’s just as capable of being geeky and ridiculous as the rest of us…when she allows herself to be.

A little more investigating and Brennan determines that the mummy is the same one that is on loan to the Jeffersonian from the Egyptian government. So once again, she must investigate her own people (she had to do it in an episode from a couple of seasons ago, I think three). She and Booth go to talk to the curator…except the curator is missing.

One of the underlings there tells Booth he will go try to find a key to her locked office. Booth just kicks the door down…and then rubs his hip in pain. That’s Booth and that’s what he does. God love him for it. That excites Brennan too. They’re such a great team like that. She’s this very insulated scientist, but she gets excited over the simplest thing as Booth using blunt force to get the job done and keep moving forward.

The curator is found dead in her office, stuffed into the mummy’s coffin, having been stabbed in the eye. Yikes. Guess we know where the blood on the mummy came from. So what’s the deal now? Was the curator the target and the mummy just happened to get blood on it so the killer moved it? Or was the mummy the target and the curator got in the way and got killed as a result? It’s a tough investigation, especially because the curator apparently wasn’t universally liked. Oh yeah, and the murder weapon was formed in ancient Rome, Hodgins tells us. Wow.

It’s a fun and creative mystery, but as always, the real joy and point of interest is watching the personal goings-on and issues between Booth and Brennan. There’s a big one this week: Booth’s boss Director Hacker starts flirting with Brennan and asks her out, and she doesn’t hesitate in accepting, even though Booth is clearly uncomfortable with the whole thing. He’s uncomfortable because having his partner sleep with his boss could complicate things for him at work, and more importantly, because he loves her.

I love Brennan, but what the hell? She has demonstrated consistently poor judgment with men. She won’t commit to Booth even though she loves him too (though she won’t admit that either because she finds it easier to dismiss the entire concept of love as outdated and intangible, and she’s not entirely wrong), and she certainly isn’t a high partying floozie. But whenever she does go out, she picks bad people, and makes insensitive choices that affect Booth.

First she almost starts going out with his brother last season, until she came to her senses and beat him like a little bitch in a bar (an awesome scene)…and now she has to go out with his boss? And speaking of boss, I’ve never even heard of this Hacker guy. Since when is he Booth’s boss? How come we never see him around? What happened to Booth’s old boss from season one, Sam Cullen, played by JAG (and The Glimmer Man!) alum John M. Jackson? I liked him a whole lot more. And of course I won’t even get into the other losers she’s gone out with like the guy who murdered his brother in the woods and claimed he was possessed by a witch, and her mentor from season one who then betrayed her in court. I didn’t like Sully either, he had no edge to him.

When she’s on her date with this Hacker loser, they’re eating at a restaurant she eats at with Booth, and she starts telling him this story that Booth told her about how he always has them hold the raw egg on the meatloaf due to a childhood incident. She says it casually and it shows how close she is with Booth…but she still doesn’t get it. When Booth finds out that she told Hacker that story, he’s upset. She doesn’t understand why, she says that he must have told a bunch of people that story. Booth says nothing. He only told her. That’s telling, and Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz really nail that scene. The two of them are really good, especially when the writers give them something strong to play off.

So this is a good source of conflict for them, and the episode wraps itself up nicely…but I hope Hacker doesn’t become a recurring part on the show, and I certainly hope Brennan doesn’t go out with him again. The other highlight of this episode is seeing Brennan watch some scenes from the classic James Whale-Boris Karloff Frankenstein and revealing that not only does she love the movie and quote all the lines, but it’s the movie that made her want to become a forensic anthropologist. I loved that scene, both as a film guy and as a Bones guy. Who knew that ultra-focused, ultra-stern Brennan would have been so heavily influenced by a classic Hollywood movie? That’s not something you would think of for Brennan normally, it’s a wonderful contradiction. And Emily has talked about that in interviews before, about how she looks for the contradictions in Brennan because in real life, people aren’t just one set, completely consistent thing.

Angela and Hodgins are welcome in this episode, and Cam even mentions something about having adopted a teenager, so I’m happy. Though I still miss some of the darker, more propulsive undercurrents from seasons one and two, I’m quite happy with the season so far and am disappointed that we don’t get new episodes until November. Until then…

Season 5, Episode 5: A Night at the Bones Museum (originally aired October 15, 2009)

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Thursdays at 8/7c on Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro